Saturday, June 23, 2012

When Firefox
version 13 debuted earlier this month, it included a new
tab-restoration feature–but at what privacy cost?

“When opening a
new tab, users are now presented with their most visited pages,”
according to Mozilla’s Firefox
13 release notes.

But as one Firefox
user discovered, that tab-restoration feature was also “taking
snapshots of the user’s HTTPS session content,”reportedThe Register, after one of its readers opened a new tab and
was “greeted by my earlier online banking and webmail sessions
complete with account numbers, balances, subject lines, etc.”

Okay, it’s bad enough that students
get strip-searched
in schools without seemingly having any right to refuse or to demand
a parent or lawyer.

But for the building administrator to
then issue a statement
on the incident that names the student and reveals additional details
about the student and his record, well, DOES ANYONE UNDERSTAND FERPA?

Yes, I’m screaming.

From a 2002 letter
from the Director of the Family Policy Compliance Office:

FERPA prohibits a
recipient of U.S. Department of Education funds from having a policy
or practice of nonconsensually disclosing personally identifiable
information derived from education records, except in certain
statutorily specified circumstances. 20 U.S.C. § 1232g(b); 34 CFR §
99.31. While there are specific statutory exceptions to the
prohibition that personally identifiable information from education
records may not be released without consent, the FERPA statute does
not include a general exception for the public disclosure of student
disciplinary records. Accordingly, these records may not be
disclosed without the prior written consent of the student or
students about whom the records relate. 20 U.S.C. § 1232g(b)(1) and
(d). See also 34 CFR § 99.30.

Did Mrs. Cox give the District explicit
consent to discuss the case in the media or for the administrator to
disclose that her son had been involved in incidents of lying during
the school year? If not…..

“Well yeah it's private. That's why
we can sell it for so much money!”

Judge Richard Posner of the U.S.
District of Northern Illinois said neither Apple nor Motorola has
been able to prove damages and that neither company would be
permitted to refile a claim, according
to All Things Digital.

Apple has been waging a patent war over
its iOS mobile operating system and Google's competing Android
OS. Motorola sued Apple in 2010, in what some saw as a preemptive
strike, but over the course of the legal proceedings, many of
Motorola's claims had been tossed out, leaving the company with
little ammunition.

The one claim Motorola had left was
based on a patent it had agreed to let other companies use in
exchange for the covered-technology becoming an industry standard (a
so-called frand
patent). At the time of his "catastrophic effects" comment
to Apple, Posner had also told Motorola's lawyers, according to
Reuters, "I don't see how you can have
injunction against the use of a standard-essential patent."

… During the legal proceedings, the
judge also pointed to serious problems with the U.S. patent system
and questioned the worth of many software patents, saying, Reuters
reported, "You can't just assume that because
someone has a patent, he has some deep moral right to exclude
everyone else."

MegaUpload founder Kim Dotcom may have
had most of his assets seized as part of his
indictment for criminal copyright infringement in January, but
that apparently hasn’t stopped him from working on his next
venture. Dotcom gave a first peak at Megabox, which is supposed to
become a kind of cloud music service, on
Twitter Wednesday, sharing a photo of what looks like a mobile
app.

For my statistics students. Match
these against cost of living and average income and numbers of
college graduates... Is there a correlation?

The Minnesota Supreme Court
has upheld a ruling that says that students can be
punished for their Facebook posts. In the unanimous
decision, it said that it wasn’t saying that public universities
can regulate students’ personal expression, but it found in this
case that the student in question had violated “academic program
rules that are narrowly tailored and directly related to established
professional conduct standards.” The student in question was part
of the University of Minnesota’s mortuary program and had posted to
Facebook statements about her playing with cadavers. (Um, isn’t
that the problem more than Facebook status updates? I’m no lawyer,
but still…) The
Chronicle has more details.

… In order to save money, Michigan
State University will be closing
thousands of alumni email accounts. The school will no longer
maintain the email accounts of students who graduated over 2 years
ago, which means the end to the .edu domain for about 117,000 people.

… After news that several of its
teen users had been approached by child predators, sexually assaulted
and raped, the flirting app Skout
has shut down its teen community. Only those 18+ will be able to use
the app. The
Wall Street Journal takes a closer look at what happened at
Skout, despite the startup having lots of precautions in place to
prevent this sort of thing.

… The Pew Center has released its
latest report,
this one on libraries and e-books. It found, among
other things, that 58% of all library card holders say they do not
know if their library provides e-book lending services. There’s a
lot more in this report than this one statistic, but it certainly
seems to indicate that the publishers’ claims that e-book lending
at libraries is going to destroy their businesses is a wee bit of an
exaggeration.

This could be real handy. I've gotta
play with this! Should every law
school student use this?

Via Daniel Schuman, The Sunlight
Foundation: "SCOUT
is a new free alert service that allows you search and create
email or text alerts on legislation shaping issues you care about in
Congress and across all fifty states. Scout
also makes it easy to search federal regulations
and what is actually said by lawmakers in the Congressional Record.

Set up alerts and subscribe to
receive updates from Congress, state legislatures and more via email
or SMS text.

Search through every bill and
regulation in the federal government.

Be notified when Congress plans to
vote on a bill.

Follow and search bills in all
50 states; powered by the Open
States project.

Import an RSS feed
to complement issue alerts."

I use the LightShot add-on at home, but
this could be handy when you are using computers that don't have
add-ons (like at school)

Windows has a built-in feature that
lets you take a screenshot of your entire screen. But to take
screenshots of specific portions of your screen, you need a desktop
app that specializes in this. In case you do not want to install a
new app for this purpose, you will find the desktop app Snaggy to be
very helpful.

Snaggy is a free to use web app that
lets you easily modify images. All you have to do to get started is
press the Print Screen button on your keyboard. This will copy the
screen’s image on the computer’s virtual clipboard. Then head on
over to the Snaggy homepage and paste in the image using the CTRL+V
hotkey shortcut.

Your image will be uploaded and a URL
provided. You will also have the option of cropping your image,
adding text to it, and adding a pencil drawing or colored rectangles
to it. Changes to the image can be saved as you work on it.

Often while streaming videos online,
you will stumble upon an interesting long video that you do not have
the time to watch completely. You could return to the video but you
would not have any marker of where you left off watching the video.
Here to help you with that is a service called Pause for Later.

Presentista is a wonderful new tool
that is easy to use and create visually strong presentations in 2D or
3D. It allows users to shape their story easily with a clear WYSIWYG
interface. It is available on mobile devies and the site is web
based. Creating a presentation on any computer that can be seen on
any other computer. It also allows users to upload their own images
and videos. A great new presentation tool.

Friday, June 22, 2012

This
is better than “My dog ate my homework.” Incompetent managers
now have an excuse that could work every time! “An undetectable
malware program is responsible for deleting my homework. I know that
is true because you can't see any evidence of it!” (Would this fly
in North Korea?)

Twitter blamed its on-again, off-again
outages Thursday on a “cascading
bug” that left 140-character addicts in a state of painful
withdrawl.

But the pain could be most acute for
Twitter itself as the company seeks to ramp up its credibility as a
go-to venue for advertisers.

Twitter
says the service was down for about an hour and
forty minutes total during two separate outages. Though
exact figures on Twitter’s revenues and traffic aren’t available,
a little basic math hints at the scale of the losses.

In terms of pure traffic, Twitter CEO
Dick Costolo said
this week that the service had topped 400 million tweets per day.
That’s nearly 17 million tweets per hour lost to the world on
average, or up to 2.83 billion characters. The number could be much
higher since the outages came during the middle of the U.S. workday.

That’s a time when ad rates are also
likely at a premium. Digital marketing research firm eMarketer Inc.
estimated at the beginning of 2012 that Twitter would reach nearly
$260 million in revenue this year. It’s a big number but still
amounts to less than $30,000 per hour on average.
A more recent report from ad-buying conglomerate Group M also
projects Twitter will bring in more than $300 million in 2012.

… “Twitter is a relatively small
platform compared to its big competitors,” says eMarketer’s Clark
Fredricksen. “When people don’t use it, that hurts.”

Track
the trackers with Collusion: Interview with Mozilla's Ryan Merkley

There are many flavors of privacy
add-ons for different browsers, but to get the global
tracking "big picture," if you haven't already then you
really need to try out Collusion.
The "interactive, real-time visualization of entities that
track your behavior" when you are surfing says a lot.

News
release: "Check Point® Software Technologies
Ltd...announced the results of a new ZoneAlarm report revealing
differences in the use of computer security between Gen Y and Baby
Boomers. The report, The
Generation Gap in Computer Security, found that Gen
Y is more confident in its security knowledge than Baby Boomers.
However, 50 percent of Gen Y respondents have had security issues in
the past two years compared to less-than-half of Baby Boomers. The
broad adoption of digital media and social networking, combined with
the increasing amount of sensitive data that is stored online, is
making personal computer security more important than ever before.
Yet the ZoneAlarm study reveals that 78 percent of
Gen Y respondents do not follow security best practices
while cybercriminals are launching new and more sophisticated attacks
on consumers every day. In comparison, Baby Boomers are more
concerned about security and privacy and twice more likely to protect
their computers with additional security software."

Google Maps isn’t just a way to get
where you’re going. It’s a way to keep an eye on your employees.

On Thursday, Google uncloaked a new
service dubbed Google Maps Coordinate that lets businesses track the
activities of remote workers — such as traveling sales staff and
field technicians — by tapping into GPS devices on their cell
phones. For instance, says Google, a cable TV company could follow
the progress of their field techs as they move from home to home
repairing cable connections.

"People create profiles on
social network sites and Twitter accounts against the background of
an audience. This paper argues that closely
examining content created by others and looking at one’s own
content through other people’s eyes, a common part of social media
use, should be framed as social surveillance. While
social surveillance is distinguished from traditional surveillance
along three axes (power, hierarchy, and reciprocity), its effects
and behavior modification is common to traditional surveillance.
Drawing on ethnographic studies of United States populations, I look
at social surveillance, how it is practiced, and its impact on
people who engage in it. I use Foucault’s concept of capillaries
of power to demonstrate that social surveillance assumes the power
differentials evident in everyday interactions rather than the
hierarchical power relationships assumed in much of the surveillance
literature. Social media involves a collapse of social contexts and
social roles, complicating boundary work but facilitating social
surveillance. Individuals strategically reveal, disclose and
conceal personal information to create connections with others and
tend social boundaries. These processes are normal parts of
day-to-day life in communities that are highly connected through
social media."

The
law of drones. I plan to use my drone fleet to develop intelligence
that will allow me to accurately predict (and sell subscriptions) the
optimum viewing time for skinny dipping Bunnies at the Playboy
Mansion.

What are the laws against drones—and
their masters—behaving badly? Turns out, there are few that
explicitly address a future where people, companies, and police all
command tiny aircraft. But many of our anxieties about that future
should be assuaged by existing regulations. We asked Ryan
Calo, a law professor at the University of Washington, to weigh
in on some of the issues.

Can
I use a drone to spy on my sexy neighbor?

Can
I use a drone to deliver a cup of coffee?[Or a pizza? Bob]

Could
a police drone look in my windows for drugs?

Could
the police follow my car with a drone?

“It
is better to be the victim's lawyer than to be the victim.” Joe
Obvious

Facebook is agreeing to give its users
the right to “limit” how the social-networking site uses their
faces in ads, as a part of a way to settle a privacy lawsuit brought
against the company.

The other part of the settlement is $10
million in fees to the lawyers who brought the case against
Facebook’s so-called Sponsored Stories program and a $10 million
donation to charity.

… The suit, filed in April 2011,
claimed that the social-networking site did not adequately inform
people of the feature or give them a way to opt out of the
advertising program that began in January 2011.

… Terms
of the deal (.pdf) were unveiled Thursday and they require
Facebook to let members be “capable of taking steps to limit their
appearance in those ads.” Read that lawyerly phrase again — it
doesn’t mean provide a way to opt out entirely.

If I video a Math lesson, tools like
this one allow my students to make “audio only” versions they can
play while commuting or jogging (but mainly, they can avoid looking
at me)

"Two days
after YouTube-MP3.org, a site that converts songs from music videos
into MP3 files, was blocked from accessing YouTube, the RIAA
has asked CNET to remove software from Download.com that performs
a similar function. The RIAA focused its criticism on software found
at Download.com called YouTubeDownloader. The organization also
pointed out that there are many other similar applications available
at the site, 'which can be used to steal content from CBS, which owns
Download.com.' CNET's policy is that Download.com is not in any
position to determine whether a piece of software is legal or not or
whether it can be used for illegal activity."

For a sufficiently broad definition of
"steal," you could argue that all kinds of software (from
word processors to graphics programs to security analysis tools)
could be implicated.

This
is just stupid... And it does nothing to protect the “good name”
of the Olympics.

"While we are importing
billions of 'cheap' products labeled 'Made in China,' the fastest
growing export from U.S. to China does not even need a label.
Chinese parents are acutely aware that the Chinese educational system
focuses too much on rote memorization, so Chinese
students have flocked to overseas universities and now even secondary
schools, despite the high cost of attending programs in America.
Chinese enrollment in U.S. universities rose 23% to 157,558 students
during the 2010-2011 academic year, making China by far the biggest
foreign presence. Even the daughter of Xi Jinping, the presumed next
president of China, studies as an undergraduate at Harvard. This
creates opportunities for universities to bring American education
directly to China. Both Duke and New York University are building
campuses in the Shanghai area to offer full-time programs to students
there."

In the fall of 2011 Peter Norvig taught
a class with Sebastian Thrun on artificial intelligence at Stanford
attended by 175 students in situ -- and over 100,000 via an
interactive webcast. He shares what he learned about teaching to a
global classroom.

Daniel Russell is a Google employee who
studies how people search on the Internet. He's a
search anthropologist. I had the pleasure of meeting him
and learning from him at the Google Teacher Academy that I attended
in 2009.

On his blog Search
ReSearch Daniel Russell posts search challenges for readers to
try. Then a few days later he explains how to solve the challenges.
The challenges are not challenges that you could solve with just a
basic query or even if you used the built-in Google Advanced Search
tools.

Thursday, June 21, 2012

"Hacker group Rex Mundi has
made good on its promise to publish
thousands of loan-applicant records it swiped from AmeriCash Advance
after the payday lender refused to fork over between $15,000 and
$20,000 as an extortion fee — or, in Rex Mundi's terms, an 'idiot
tax.' The group announced on June 15 that it was able to steal
AmeriCash's customer databecause the
company had left a confidential page unsecured on one of its servers.
'This page allows its affiliates to see how many loan applicants
they recruited and how much money they made,' according to the
group's post on dpaste.com. 'Not only was this page unsecured, it
was actually referenced in their robots.txt file.'"

Jon Campbell of the L.A.
Weekly has a chilling report in tomorrow’s edition on license
plate readers used by California law enforcement and the “BOSS”
database that is being developed. Here’s a snippet:

L.A. Weekly
has learned that more than two dozen law enforcement agencies in
Los Angeles County are using hundreds of these “automatic license
plate recognition” devices (LPRs) — units about the size of a
paperback book, usually mounted atop police cruisers — to devour
data on every car that catches their electronic eye.

The L.A. County
Sheriff’s Department and the Los Angeles Police Department are two
of the biggest gatherers of automatic license plate recognition
information. Local police agencies have logged more than 160 million
data points — a massive database of the movements of millions of
drivers in Southern California.

Each data point
represents a car and its exact whereabouts at a given time. Police
have already conducted, on average, some 22 scans for
every one of the 7,014,131 vehicles registered in L.A. County.
Because it’s random, some cars are scanned numerous times, others
never.

The use of the system has expanded
significantly since its first introduction in 2005:

In
2005, when LPR made its debut here, police
agencies generally threw out all of the unneeded information that
wasn’t tied to a stolen or otherwise wanted vehicle.

Now there’s a
lot of cheap digital storage space, so LAPD holds all
of its data for five years, Long Beach for two, the
Sheriff’s Department for two.

But Sgt. John Gaw,
with the Sheriff’s Department, says, “I’d keep
it indefinitely if I could.”

ACLU’s Bibring
calls these long retention times “exceedingly troubling,” and
state Sen. Joe Simitian has introduced legislation setting a 60-day
retention limit, which copies the California Highway Patrol.

Police officials
are quick to note that the information being gathered
isn’t private. License plates are owned by the DMV and
routinely recorded by police — that’s one of the main reasons
they exist.

“It’s not Big
Brother,” Gaw says. “It’s doing what a deputy normally does in
his routine duties.”

So this is what it comes down to if
there’s no reasonable expectation of privacy in public. The police
can record and store millions of data points about you and figure out
your location for any point in time for the last few years?

James Temple writes that facial
recognition technology has outpaced policy on its use:

There are
obviously useful applications, like automatically tagging your
buddies in a social-network photo or – on an entirely different
scale – recognizing known terrorists at airports. But there are
frightening ones as well: allowing authoritarian states to identify
peaceful protesters, enabling companies to accrue ever greater
insight into private lives or empowering criminals to dig up
sensitive information about strangers.

“Facial
recognition blows up assumptions that we don’t wear our identities
on our person; it turns our faces into name tags,” said Ryan Calo,
director of privacy at Stanford’s Center for Internet and Society.
“It can be good and helpful, or it can be dangerous.”

At a minimum, the
technology demands a serious policy debate over the
appropriate ground rules for this tool. But, of course,
government officials are still grappling with online privacy
questions from a decade ago, as private industry and law enforcement
happily march ahead.

A roulette wheel in Las Vegas
reportedly hit the number 19 an incredible seven
times in a row Monday night. As if that wasn't astounding
enough, after the streak was broken by the wheel landing on 15, it
hit 19 yet again on the very next spin!

… Just how rare is this? According
to the Las Vegas Sun, the odds of this happening are 3
billion to one. [This is incorrect. I'll
have my students calculate 1/38 to the seventh power Bob]
The Rio has yet to verify the event... in fact, until the Sun
contacted the casino on Tuesday, Caesars Entertainment officials
weren't even aware that this had happened. [This makes me suspect it
is a fake Bob]

Just what I need for my Math students.
I have found that if they work too long on Math without a break,
their heads explode.

The Pomodoro technique is a very
popular method for effective time management. It requires you
to work on a task for 25 minutes, then take a break for 5 minutes
before resuming your task. Plus, for every 2 hours you work, you
take a longer break. The tool PomodoroTimer lets you do that with
ease.

Just browse to the tool and click
“start” to turn the timer on. Once 25 minutes are over, the tool
will notify you so you can take a break. Once the break is over, you
can resume your task again. The tool is very simple and doesn’t
have any extensive features or functionality, and this simplicity
actually helps you focus more on the task at hand.

This morning in a workshop that I
facilitated with Greg Kulowiec there was a great discussion about
copyright, Creative Commons, and fair use as it relates to using
media in iBooks Author. During that conversation, Common
Craft's explanation of Creative Commons was helpful. Later in
the day I had a conversation with a couple of teachers who were also
concerned about students plagiarizing work when constructing iBooks.
That conversation prompted me to dig up some resources fore teaching
students what plagiarism is, how to avoid it, and how to detect it.

Education is the best prevention.

These are resources that can be helpful
in explaining to students what plagiarism is and how they can avoid
it.

The United States and Israel are
responsible for developing the sophisticated espionage rootkit known
as Flame, according to anonymous Western sources quoted in a news
report.

The malware was designed to provide
intelligence about Iran’s computer networks and spy on Iranian
officials through their computers as part of an ongoing cyberwarfare
campaign, according
to the Washington Post.

The program was a joint effort of the
National Security Agency, the CIA and Israel’s military, which also
produced the Stuxnet worm that is believed to have sabotaged
centrifuges used for Iran’s uranium enrichment program in 2009 and
2010.

“This is about
preparing the battlefield for another type of covert action,”
a former high-ranking US intelligence official told the Post.
“Cyber collection against the Iranian program is way further down
the road than this.”

Try
your hand at intelligence? What did we know and when did we know it?

News
release: "The National Security Archive today is posting
over 100 recently released CIA documents relating to September 11,
Osama bin Laden, and U.S. counterterrorism operations. The
newly-declassified records, which the Archive obtained under the
Freedom of Information Act, are referred to in footnotes to the 9/11
Commission Report and present an unprecedented public resource for
information about September 11. The collection includes rarely
released CIA emails, raw intelligence cables, analytical summaries,
high-level briefing materials, and comprehensive counterterrorism
reports that are usually withheld from the public because of their
sensitivity. Today's posting covers a variety of topics of major
public interest, including background to al-Qaeda's planning for the
attacks; the origins of the Predator program now in heavy use over
Afghanistan,
Pakistan and Iran; al-Qaeda's relationship with Pakistan; CIA
attempts to warn about the impending threat; and the impact of budget
constraints on the U.S. government's hunt for bin Laden. Today's
posting is the result of a series of FOIA requests by National
Security Archive staff based on a painstaking review of references in
the 9/11
Commission Report."

"In his essay 'Capitalists
Who Fear Change,' author Jeffrey Tucker takes on 'wimps who don't
want to improve.' From DMCA take-downs on 3D printing files to the
constant refrain that every new form of music recording will 'kill
music,' Mr. Tucker observes, 'Through our long history of
improvement, every upgrade and every shift from old to new inspired
panic. The biggest panic typically comes from
the producers themselves who resent the way the market process
destabilizes their business model.' He analyzes
how the markets move the march of technology ever forward. He takes
on patents, copyrights, tariffs, and protectionism of entrenched
interests in general, with guarded optimism: 'The promise of the
future is nothing short of spectacular — provided that those who
lack the imagination to see the potential here don't get their way.'"

DO machines speak? If so, do they have
a constitutional right to free speech?

… In today’s world, we have
delegated many of our daily decisions to computers. On the drive to
work, a GPS device suggests the best route; at your desk, Microsoft
Word guesses at your misspellings, and Facebook recommends new
friends. In the past few years, the suggestion has been made that
when computers make such choices they are “speaking,” and enjoy
the protections of the First Amendment.

This is a bad idea that threatens the
government’s ability to oversee companies and protect consumers.

For
my Business Continuity class: Remember that “highly improbable”
is not “impossible.”

Annals
of bad luck: when primary, backup, and second backup power fail

A new root
cause analysis describes an Amazon outage that
occurred last week in Amazon's East Coast data centers. The report
shows a series of problems resulted in virtual machines and storage
volumes losing primary, backup, and secondary backup power. A cable
fault took down the main service, a defective cooling fan messed up a
backup generator, and finally an incorrectly configured circuit
breaker caused secondary backup to fail.

The project is completely web-based,
and it is designed to help users with writing basic code in both HTML
and CSS. Thimble is
part of Mozilla’s Webmaker Project, which is designed to encourage
people to create their own content on the web.

Early
beta version of Zanran - search for 'semi-structured' data on the web

"Zanran
helps you to find ‘semi-structured’ data on the web. This is the
numerical data that people have presented as graphs
and tables and charts. For example, the data could be a
graph in a PDF report, or a table in an Excel spreadsheet, or a
barchart shown as an image in an HTML page. This huge amount of
information can be difficult to find using conventional search
engines, which are focused primarily on finding text rather than
graphs, tables and bar charts... Zanran doesn't work by spotting
wording in the text and looking for images – it's the other way
round. The system examines millions of images and decides for each
one whether it's a graph, chart or table – whether it has numerical
content. The core technology is patented computer vision algorithms
that decide whether an image is numerical – and they're accurate
(about 98%). But the huge majority of images on the internet are not
graphs etc. So even though the accuracy is high, you will still get
some non-numerical images. In comparison, looking for tables is
relatively simple. Once we've found a table we then have to decide
whether it's essentially numerical - and we have algorithms for
that."

(Related) Finding those on the left of
the curve (because sometimes you don't want the 'best and the
brightest.'

"'Nigerian scams' (also known
as '419 scams' but more accurately called 'advance fee fraud')
continue to clog up inboxes with tales of fantastic wealth for the
recipient. The raises the question: Do people still fall for this
rubbish? The emails often outline ridiculous scenarios but promise
millions if a person offers to help get money out of a country. The
reason for the ridiculous scenarios seems obvious in retrospect:
According to research by Cormac Herley at Microsoft, scammers
are looking for the most gullible people, and
their crazy emails can help weed out people who are savvy enough to
know better. Contrary to what people believe, the
scams aren't 'free' for the scammers (PDF): sending an email
might have close to zero cost attached, but the process of getting
money out of someone can be quite complicated and incurs costs (for
example, recruiting other parties to participate in the scam). So at
the end of the day, the scammer wants to find
people who will almost certainly fall for the scam and offer a good
return."

"The primary aim of DOAB
is to increase discoverability of Open Access books. Academic
publishers are invited to provide metadata of their Open Access books
to DOAB. [Currently there are 1098 Academic
peer-reviewed books from 27 publishers.] Metadata will be
harvestable in order to maximize dissemination, visibility and
impact. Aggregators can integrate the records in their commercial
services and libraries can integrate the directory into their online
catalogues, helping scholars and students to discover the books. The
directory will be open to all publishers who publish academic, peer
reviewed books in Open Access and should contain as many books as
possible, provided that these publications are in Open Access and
meet academic standards."

The surveillance experts at the
National Security Agency won’t tell two powerful United States
Senators how many Americans have had their communications picked up
by the agency as part of its sweeping new counterterrorism powers.
The reason: it would violate your privacy to say so.

That claim comes in a short letter sent
Monday to civil libertarian Senators Ron Wyden and Mark Udall. The
two members of the Senate’s intelligence oversight committee asked
the NSA a simple question last month: under the broad
powers granted in 2008′s expansion of the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Act, how many persons inside the United States have been
spied upon by the NSA?

The query bounced around the
intelligence bureaucracy until it reached I. Charles McCullough, the
Inspector General of the Office of the Director of National
Intelligence, the nominal head of the 16 U.S. spy agencies. In a
letter
acquired by Danger Room, McCullough told the senators that the
NSA inspector general “and NSA leadership agreed that an IG review
of the sort suggested would further violate the privacy of U.S.
persons,” McCullough wrote.

… What’s more, McCullough argued,
giving such a figure of how many Americans were spied on was “beyond
the capacity” of the NSA’s in-house watchdog — and to rectify
it would require “imped[ing]” the very spy missions that concern
Wyden and Udall. “I defer to [the NSA inspector general's]
conclusion that obtaining such an estimate was beyond the capacity of
his office and dedicating sufficient additional resources would
likely impede the NSA’s mission,” McCullough wrote.

(Related) Drones are the “not quite
war” tool of choice in countries where the infrastructure does not
favor CyberWar...

The center of the US
drone war has shifted to Yemen, where 23 American strikes have
killed an estimated 155 people so far this year. But you wouldn’t
know about it — or about the cruise missile attacks, or about the
US commando teams in Yemen — by reading the report the White House
sent to Congress about US military activities around the globe.
Instead, there’s only the blandest acknowledgement of “direct
action” in Yemen, “against a limited number of [al-Qaida]
operatives and senior leaders.”

The report,
issued late Friday, is the first
time the United States has publicly, officially acknowledged the
operations in Yemen and in nearby Somalia that anyone with internet
access could’ve told you about years ago.

Looks like everyone wants to 'drone
up.' One of the problems with simple, cheap and effective tools.

"This paper presents a
detailed analysis of the proposed merger between Universal Music
Group (UMG) and EMI by applying the standards and methods
outlined in the recently revised Department of Justice/Federal Trade
Commission Merger Guidelines. It shows that the UMG‐EMI merger is
“an unfair method of competition” that constitutes “an
unreasonable restraint of trade” because it will “substantially
lessen competition” and is “likely to enhance market power.”
Simply put, the postmerger firm will have a strong incentive and
increased ability to exercise market power, particularly in
undermining, delaying, or distorting new digital distribution
business models, in a market that has been a tight oligopoly for
over a decade. The merger creates a highly concentrated market by
eliminating one of only four major record labels and results in an
increase in concentration that is five times the level that the
DOJ/FTC identify as a cause of concern. The recent history of
anticompetitive, anti‐consumer conduct by this tight oligopoly and
the role of EMI as a maverick in the digital era compound the
anticompetitive effects of the merger and significantly increase the
likelihood that the merger will not only result in higher prices but
also undermine incipient competition."

I find her work interesting... And we
should have been teaching classes on this years ago...

For the last two years, I’ve been
studying social media from all angles in anticipation of teaching a
full course on Social Media (which I did in the Winter 2012
semester). During that time, I tweeted all sorts of articles,
videos, blog posts, and resources related to all aspects of Social
Media.

Today I’m doing a 4-hour workshop on
Social Media for the MCCVLCC,
and in an effort to organize and make sense of two years of study, I
decided to build a mindmap
about Social Media from all the tweets I’ve made about this in
the last year.

Data
Citation Brochure published by UK's Economic and Social Research
Council

"Just to let you all know that
here at the Economic and Social Data Service in the UK we have been
working with the ESRC on a brochure to encourage data citation
amongst our social scientists and journal publishers. In October
2011 we minted over 5000 DOIs for our ESDS Collection with Datacite,
using a methodology we developed to deal with version changes to our
data. You can view our Webinarthat explains how we do this. We have also spoken at
various Datacite events. We are currently sending out over 1000
brochures to all the major UK and key European social science
publishers and professional societies in the UK. View
our brochure
and feel free to borrow from it!"

Monday, June 18, 2012

"I am the IT Manager for
Shambhala Mountain
Center, near Red Feather
Lakes, Colorado. We are in the pre-evacuation area for
the High Park Fire.
What is the best way to load 50+ workstations, 6 servers, IP phones,
networking gear, printers and wireless equipment into a 17-foot
U-Haul? We have limited packing supplies. We also need to spend as
much time as possible working with the fire crew on fire risk
mitigation."

The Intro to Business class should
teach: “Leave no potential source of revenue unexplored.” That
does not mean you should keep it secret.

There are so many complaints and
lawsuits following breaches that I long ago gave up on mentioning
them all. But Kristen Stewart of the Salt Lake Tribune
reports on one complaint that I found particularly interesting:

When University of
Utah health law professor Leslie Francis learned her name and Social
Security number had been exposed in the state’s Medicaid breach,
she decided to do what any scholar might do — investigate.

She deduced that,
like the majority of breach victims, her information was sent to the
Utah Department of Health by a provider inquiring whether she was
covered by Medicaid.

That was a
surprise, because she is insured through her employer and none
of her providers had declared in privacy notices that they may bill
Medicaid. What’s more, when she asked the hospital she
believes is at fault to “fess up” — citing the Health Insurance
Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) — the hospital refused,
citing the same law.

The professor went on to file
complaints with HHS, OCR, and the FTC. Read more on Salt
Lake Tribune.

Kevin Hunt travels
whenever he finds time off and a good deal. So when his credit
statement listed Kayak.com, he went to the travel booking site to see
which trip the charge was for.

The site allows
people to find reservation details by searching their last name and
the last four digits of their credit card. When Hunt keyed in his
information, he found his hotel booking for an upcoming trip to
Vermont.

But he also found
bookings for people named Hunt in Oklahoma and Massachusetts,
complete with their home addresses, phone numbers and emails, as well
as credit card expiry dates.

Read more on The
Toronto Star and see what you think of the firm’s response to
the customer.

[From the article:

But he also found bookings for people
named Hunt in Oklahoma and Massachusetts, complete with their home
addresses, phone numbers and emails, as well as credit card expiry
dates.

“It’s scary,” said Hunt, a
Markham elementary school teacher. “You can see
where someone lives and when they’ll be out of town. It’s like
an invitation.”

He’d used an American Express credit
card, which often end in numbers between 1001 and 1009. Typing those
numbers alongside common names like Smith, he was able to find scores
of strangers’ personal information.

Joseph Menn of Reuters reports that
some U.S. firms are fighting back against hackers in unorthodox –
if not downright illegal – ways:

“Not only do we
put out the fire, but we also look for the arsonist,” said Shawn
Henry, the former head of cybercrime investigations at the FBI who in
April joined new cyber security company CrowdStrike,
which aims to provide clients with a menu of active responses.

Once a company
detects a network breach, rather than expel the intruder immediately,
it can waste the hacker’s time and resources by appearing to grant
access to tempting material that proves impossible to extract.
Companies can also allow intruders to make off with bogus files or
“beacons” that reveal information about the thieves’ own
machines, experts say.

Henry and
CrowdStrike co-founder Dmitri Alperovich do not
recommend that companies try to breach their opponent’s computers,
but they say the private sector does need to fight back more boldly
against cyber espionage.

It
is commonplace for law firms to have their emails read during
negotiations for ventures in China, Alperovich told the Reuters
Global Media and Technology Summit. That has given the other side
tremendous leverage because they know the Western client company's
strategy, including the most they would be willing to pay for a
certain stake.

But if a
company knows its lawyers will be hacked, it can
plant false information and get the upper hand.

…
Veteran government and private officials warn that much of the
activity is too risky to make sense, citing the chances for
escalation and collateral damage.

"There
is no business case for it and no possible positive
outcome," said John Pescatore, a National Security
Agency and Secret Service veteran who leads research firm Gartner's
Internet security practice.

…
Because some national governments are suspected in attacks on private
Western companies, it is natural that some of the victims want to
join their own governments to fight back.

"It's
time to have the debate about what the actions would be for the
private sector," former NSA director Kenneth Minihan said at the
RSA security conference held earlier this year in San Francisco.

In April,
Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano told the
San Jose Mercury News that officials had been
contemplating authorizing even "proactive" private-entity
attacks, although there has been little follow-up comment.

"Governments are sticking their
noses into Google's servers more than ever before. In the second
half of 2011, Google received 6,321
requests that it hand over its users' private data to U.S.
government agencies including law enforcement, and complied at least
partially with those requests in 93% of cases, according to the
latest update to the company's bi-annual Transparency Report. That's
up from 5,950 requests in the first half of 2011, and marks a 37%
increase in the number of requests over the same period the year
before. Compared with the second half of 2009, the first time Google
released the government request numbers, the latest figures represent
a 76% spike. Data demands from foreign governments have increased
even more quickly than those from the U.S., up to 11,936 in the
second half of 2011 compared with 9,600 in the same period the year
before, though Google was much less likely to comply with those
non-U.S. government requests."

"The BBC reports that the UK's
Draft Communications Bill includes a provision which could be used to
force the Royal Mail and other mail carriers to retain data
on all physical mail passing through their networks. The law
could be used to force carriers to maintain a database of any data
written on the outside of an envelope or package which could be
accessed by government bodies at will. Such data could include
sender, recipient and type of mail (and, consequentially, the entire
contents of a postcard). It would provide a physical analog of the
recently proposed internet surveillance laws. The Home Office claims
that it has no current plans to enforce the
law." [Future plans are already
in place Bob]

Sag, Matthew, Predicting Fair Use
(February 25, 2012). Ohio State Law Journal, Vol. 73:1 47-91 (2012);
TRPC 2011; Loyola University Chicago School of Law Research Paper No.
2012-005. Available
at SSRN

"Fair use is often criticized
as unpredictable and doctrinally incoherent - a conclusion which
necessarily implies that the copyright system is fundamentally
broken. This article confronts that critique by systematically
assessing the predictability of fair use outcomes in litigation.
Concentrating on characteristics of the contested use that would be
apparent to litigants pre-trial, this study tests a number of
doctrinal assumptions, claims and intuitions that have not, until
now, been subject to empirical scrutiny. This
article presents new empirical evidence for the significance of
transformative use in determining the outcomes of fair use cases.
It also substantially undermines conceptions of the doctrine that
are hostile to fair use claims by commercial entities and that would
restrict limit the application of fair use as a subsidy or a
redistributive tool favoring the politically and economically
disadvantaged. Based on the available evidence, the fair use
doctrine is more rational and consistent than is commonly assumed."

LLRX.com
- Should libraries start their own, more trustworthy Facebook?

Via LLRX.com:
Should
libraries start their own, more trustworthy Facebook? - David
Rothman proposes that the time may be fast upon us for libraries —
perhaps allied with academic institutions, newspapers and other local
media — to start their own more trustworthy Facebook. His
involvement with the Digital Public Library of America provides a
reference point and support for the integral role that this new model
of virtual connectivity and knowledge sharing can play moving
forward.

Climate change itself is already in the
process of definitively rebutting climate alarmists who think human
use of fossil fuels is causing ultimately catastrophic global
warming. That is because natural climate cycles have already turned
from warming to cooling, global temperatures have already been
declining for more than 10 years, and global temperatures will
continue to decline for another two decades or more.

That is one of the most interesting
conclusions to come out of the seventh International Climate Change
Conference sponsored by the Heartland Institute, held last week in
Chicago.

While American internet users can quite
happily watch Hulu, the fact that I live in the UK means I can’t.
Likewise, BBC iPlayer is free for UK citizens; but if your physical
location says America then you’re out of luck buddy. It’s a
frustrating state of affairs, and we won’t stand for it! Neither
will Tunlr.net: a new free service
that aims to remove region restrictions the world over by way of some
magic DNS trickery.

Links

About Me

I live in Centennial Colorado. (I'm not actually 100 years old., but I hope to be some day.) I'm an independant computer consultant, specializing in solving problems that traditional IT personnel tend to have difficulty with... That includes everything from inventorying hardware & software, to converting systems & data, to training end-users. I particularly enjoy taking on projects that IT has attempted several times before with no success. I also teach at two local Universities: everything from Introduction to Microcomputers through Business Continuity and Security Management. My background includes IT Audit, Computer Security, and a variety of unique IT projects.